A couple nights ago, my family ate dinner at a restaurant. The silverware we used was in someone else’s mouth at lunch — those forks and spoons right on some stranger’s tongue.

Last week, I stayed at a hotel. The linens I slept on, the towels I used after my shower, had been against the skin of strangers a day or two previously.

We aren’t grossed out by the silverware in restaurants or the towels in hotels, and for good reason. We all wash dishes. We all do the laundry. We know what clean dishes and clean towels mean — and if anything, we know that restaurants and hotels use a temperature of hot water that makes their silverware and their linens cleaner even than those we offer guests in our own home.

So what’s with all the squeamishness about re-using water?

Why does water that’s been explicitly cleaned for re-use conjure images that the forks and wash cloths don’t?

The real problem is that almost none of us ever clean our water, or know anything about how water gets clean.

The headline, across four columns on the front of the print edition and prominently on the nytimes.com home page, declares, “As ‘Yuck Factor’ Subsides, Treated Wastewater Flows from Taps.”

Today’s story focuses, yet again, on Orange County, California’s, impressive system for cleaning wastewater to drinking water quality, then returning it to the aquifer from which 2.4 million people draw their drinking water, including Anaheim and Santa Ana.

But the story misses at least two of the most dramatic and long-standing examples of re-use in the country — examples that have been going on for years and show how valuable re-use is, and how having the political courage to put systems in place changes public skepticism to public support.

Orange County, the NYT story says, cleans 70 million gallons of water a day for return to its aquifer (enough for about 700,000 people).

Las Vegas, in fact, recycles 94 percent of the water that hits a drain anywhere in the Las Vegas metro area. The Las Vegas water — from kitchen sinks in Henderson, from hot tubs along the Strip — is cleaned to just-below drinking water standards (tertiary cleaning, it’s called), and returned to Lake Mead, the reservoir from which Las Vegas draws virtually all its drinking water.

How much water does Las Vegas clean and return each day? Over the last decade, the city has averaged 180 million gallons of recycled water a day, more than twice what San Diego is recyling (although slightly less clean).

All the water Las Vegas cleans and recycles flows into Lake Mead through a stream called the Las Vegas Wash. You can stand on the banks of the Wash and watch Las Vegas’s water being returned to its source.

In 1986, Orange County, Florida, the county that surrounds Orlando and includes places like Universal Studios, created wastewater recycling plants, and it created the customers for them. The county mandated that going forward, all new construction — homes, schools, soccer fields, office parks — would have to use recycled water for outdoor watering. The county did not mandate retrofitting — every home and shopping mall and office was grandfathered. But every new subdivision and theme park would have to include a purple pipe system.

That’s 53 million gallons of water a day — enough for a half million people — that doesn’t have to come out of Florida’s shrinking Floridan Aquifer.

It’s not just water, of course, it’s attitude. In Central Florida, there’s a whole generation of builders, public officials, residents and school children who think it’s silly to water the lawn with purified drinking water.

In Las Vegas, home to more water ostentatiousness than any U.S. city, residents know that the only way to survive in the desert is to reuse the water you’ve already got.

And Water Currents’ Sandra Postel wrote last month about how Australians have discovered that water-cleaning technology has advanced so far that businesses don’t need to wait for their communities to start re-using wastewater. Small systems can be installed on a golf course, for instance, that tap wastewater pipes and clean and reuse the water before it can even get back to the municipal treatment plant.

In fact, the real problem has been attitude and presentation, not technology. The conversation about reusing water has been consistently hijacked by that mindless three-word phrase “toilet-to-tap.” And water people — great at pipes and pumps, but not so great at marketing — have been completely stumped.

What makes the phrase particularly dumb is that all water is, in fact, toilet to tap. No geology on Earth is making “new water.” All the water we’ve got is all the water we’ve ever had — your pristine Evian was pee at some point.

We’re not all using disposable silverware and towels. And our water is equally cleanable — and not disposable at all.

Charles Fishman is an award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author who has spent the last four years traveling the world to understand and explain water issues. He is the author of The Big Thirst.

Comments

[…] and even desalinated seawater spent some part of its long history as sewage. A brilliant article by Charles Fishman writing for National Geographic stated clearly that even “…Evian water was pee at some […]

I helped design some of the facilities in Orange County, Florida. I would never use reuse water directly. Let the water go back to nature first then reuse it as it comes around again. Because of what I know, I will always be squeamish about drinking reuse water directly.

Can you tell us a little more? Orange County of course does not use advanced water treatment, as you would for potable reuse.

Al Feldzamen

Ithaca, NY

February 12, 2012, 11:22 am

About 100 years ago the great British physicist Eddington posed the following question: if you could mark in some special way all the molecules in a glass of water, took this glass to the seashore, emptied it into the sea, and then thoroughly mixed all the waters of the earth — all the oceans, lakes, streams, clouds, waters in living things, waters underground, etc. — and then took a glass of water from an ocean or a lake or stream anywhere, what would be the probability of including in that glass any of the marked molecules from the original glass? The surprising (correct) answer is that, on the average, there would be 100 such molecules! Thus it is a certainty that water from the pee of Alexander the Great, or anyone, is in your drinking glass.

Acequia Commissioner in New Mexico

Cedar Crest, NM

February 12, 2012, 10:56 am

The term ‘waste’ is wrong. A better choice could be ‘abused’.

ilmarinen g vogel

Edgartown, ma ssachusetts. USA

February 11, 2012, 10:49 pm

the education and reevaluation of the plumbing code are a high priority that needs to be adressed. i am afraid that the wastewaterstream will be going the way of electricity, oil, gas and drinking water in bottles. suddenly there is an owner who can effectively prevent individual water purification systems from coming on the market, just as it happend with the solid waste stream,where impressive systems for 98% recycling have disappeared from view, by purchasing the patents and then working on momopolising the systems with public funding until we have to pay for each dump shower and flush for the entitlement of the owner of cetralized solutions. as a builder, i am ashamed about the systhematic obsolescence we have created. it requires education to create independance and to succeed with conservation and sustainabiliy. thank you for your remarks. i am a riverkeeper.

Ima Ryma

February 11, 2012, 4:34 am

All life takes in water to live,
Flowing therein, doing its thing,
Then being exuded to give
To more life in a wondrous ring.
The waters of the world have flowed
Recycling through all time and space.
Humans have made tap and commode,
And judge the water in each place.
But water is not bad or good
Because of where it was or is.
Water sustains life as it should.
Making judgements is human biz.

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